Where We Belong

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  “You know how to set these up?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, this one has a diagram. But they all work pretty much the same way. The poles are in sections, and you put them together. They fit together. And then you slide them through these loops on the outside of the tent. And then when you put the ends of the poles into these grommet holes, it stands up like a dome.”

  I followed along on the diagram, and it looked easy.

  “Thanks. I think I can manage that.”

  “This one has a footprint. Like a tarp you can put down underneath to keep the bottom dry in the rain. So my advice is, sleep in that one. Put your stuff in the other one, but put things on the bottom that won’t get ruined if they get wet. If you have boxes, maybe stack them on top of more waterproof things.”

  “Okay.”

  It sounded like something a parent should take charge of. It made me wish I had a parent who took charge.

  “If you have any trouble, come back.”

  “Okay.” I started to turn. To go back out into the downpour. But I stopped. “How did you know we didn’t have a tent?” I asked him. I could hear my teeth chattering a little as I asked it.

  “I didn’t, for sure. But you’re not the first family to show up in a campground with everything they own, and not quite prepared for camping.”

  “Oh. I thought it was just us. I thought everybody else had it together.”

  He laughed, one quick little snort. “Hardly.”

  I turned to duck out into the rain again, but he stopped me with a word.

  “Wait.”

  I waited.

  “I have to ask you something. I’m sorry, but I just have to. Are you safe? Or are you being hurt?”

  I swear, I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t feel safe, no. And I got hurt every time I turned around. But it didn’t feel like he could be talking about any of that.

  “Not sure I understand the question.”

  He lifted one hand and pointed to his own forehead. My hand immediately went up to mine. It hurt to touch it.

  “Oh. That.”

  “That and the fact that you have that old scar from a split lip.”

  “I’m safe. I’m not being hurt.”

  “I want to believe you.”

  “This,” I said, pointing to my forehead, “was my own stupidity. I reached down to get something I dropped and banged it on a counter. The lip was my little sister. But not exactly on purpose. I do get hurt sometimes trying to take care of her. But she can’t help it. She’s got ASD. That’s—”

  “I know exactly what that is,” he said. I watched his eyes change. All the warm, open stuff flew away. What got left behind looked lost and sad. “My wife and I have a son who’s autistic.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “He live with you in there?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lucky. You’re lucky he can live on his own.”

  Even less warm and open. Even more lost and sad. “He doesn’t live on his own. He’s severely autistic. He lives in a facility where they know how to take care of people who have his problems.”

  Just in that moment, I realized something. Two things, really. That for a minute, I’d liked this guy. And that I didn’t anymore.

  “We’re not doing that,” I said.

  “I wish you the best. My wife still has a little white line of scar on her chin. Nearly thirty years later, you can still see it.”

  “I have to go,” I said. “Thanks for the tents.”

  I ran all the way back in the rain. But… back to what? It wasn’t like this rented patch of dirt was any kind of shelter. It wasn’t really much of anything. But just at the moment, it was all we had. I had no choice but to think of it as home.

  “You’re going to have to back up more,” I told my mom.

  My teeth were chattering. I was soaked to the skin from putting up both tents in the pouring rain. Then again, I’d been soaked to the skin before I started on the tents. So I kept telling myself, once you’re soaked, you can’t get any more soaked. But it was only around forty degrees out. Which meant when night came, I might be seeing my first snow. Which would have been great through a window. Or in dry clothes. Neither of which seemed likely.

  I wondered how many blankets we had.

  My mom got into the car to try again to back the trailer right up to the flap of the big tent. The one with no footprint to keep it dry on the bottom.

  I heard her shift the station wagon into gear. I could hear Sophie, awake now and still strapped into her car seat. But I think I was the only one who would have known what that sound was. She’d lost her voice completely. It sounded like a steady whisper. Like wind blowing hard in dry grass, but a little louder.

  The trailer came back toward me, but not straight. It jackknifed a bit, heading off in the wrong direction.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  She did.

  “Just leave it right there.”

  I decided it would be easier to move the tent into the right position than to try to get my mom to move the trailer into the right position.

  I pulled up the tent stakes. Then I threw the trailer doors open wide. And I slid the tent so the open flap was right up against the back of the trailer. It didn’t help much. There was still a steady sheet of water pouring off the tent, and we’d still have to hand everything right through it. I didn’t stake it down again, because it struck me that we’d be filling it with lots of heavy stuff.

  My mom climbed into the back of the trailer and grabbed a box.

  “No,” I said. “Boxes last. I told you.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She handed me my metal trunk. Apparently, she’d thrown it into the very back of the trailer, so I’d have more room to sleep in the car. I placed it off to the side of the tent, where it wouldn’t get buried.

  “I’m getting soaked,” she said.

  “Join the club. I hope we have a lot of blankets.”

  “Some. I’m not sure what you mean by a lot.”

  She handed me a plastic bin full of towels. I put those off to the side, too. It was dawning on me that almost everything would need to be where we could reach it easily. Which was sort of impossible.

  “We’ll need a lot of blankets,” I said.

  “They were always enough before.”

  “It’s going to be cold tonight.”

  “It’s practically summer.”

  “We’re at a higher elevation. Do you really not get it that it’s colder in the mountains?”

  “Oh. Right.” She handed me a cardboard carton. “I’m sorry. There’s really nothing much that isn’t a cardboard box. So I’m just giving you the ones with dishes and pots and pans and stuff first. The boxes’ll get soaked, but at least the stuff won’t get ruined. There’s some stuff in trash bags. That can go on the floor. But we can’t really stack much on them.”

  I dropped the box right in the middle of the tent, which was already wet. I didn’t know if it was coming up through the tent floor or blowing and splashing in through the open flap. Or pouring off me. I couldn’t believe we were supposed to live like this for as long as anybody could imagine.

  “Take Sophie with you when you go to take the trailer back,” I said.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “No.”

  “Why aren’t you coming?”

  “I need to get dry.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  “I don’t want all our stuff left alone. What if it gets stolen?”

  “It’s not worth much.”

  “It’s all our stuff.”

  “Sooner or later, it’ll have to be here without us.”

  “I’m not going. Okay? I’m not. I’m upset, and I want to be by myself. I need alone time. Usually I’d just go out if I needed alone time. But we’re not in walking distance of anything, and it’s pouring rain and freezing. So take her and go take the damn trailer back and at least leave me in
the sleeping tent by myself. You have any idea how hard it’s going to be, living like this? All three of us, in that tent? In the pouring rain?”

  “Can’t rain forever.”

  She handed me another box. It felt light.

  “Are we on to clothes already?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell what all’s in here. Just put it on top of the kitchen stuff. I don’t know what I packed in what. I was in a hurry.”

  “And what if it stops raining? There’s no fence. We don’t have a yard. How are we supposed to handle her if we’re not fenced in?”

  “Your complaints aren’t helping, Angie.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. They’re all I’ve got right now.”

  “Just go in the other tent and be alone. I’ll finish this. And then I’ll take Sophie, and we’ll take the trailer back.”

  I ducked out into the rain fast, before she changed her mind.

  “You have to let her out first, though,” I said. Even though it meant I had to stand there in the rain to say it.

  “Why? You just said there’s no fence.”

  “You can’t keep her strapped into that seat for a whole day. Which it will’ve been by the time you get back. It’s cruel. It’s like abuse.”

  I could feel the rain running into my eyes and ears.

  She didn’t answer. So I just ducked into shelter.

  It wasn’t much shelter. It was out of the rain—there was that to be said for it. But there was nothing inside the tent but me. And I was soaked through, so the more I sat there, hugging my knees and shivering, the more a pool of rainwater formed under my butt.

  But at least I was alone.

  It was probably an hour later when I unzipped the tent flap and stuck my head out. Rain blew in, adding to the lake I’d created.

  I’d begun to wonder what was taking my mom so long.

  I was pretty desperate to go into the big tent and find towels and dry clothes, and maybe a blanket. But I’d been trying to wait until they were gone. They should have been gone by then. I was starting to wonder what the hell was going on. I knew I would have heard the car start up and drive away. If it had.

  The car and trailer sat right where they’d been all along. No Mom, no Sophie.

  I climbed out into the downpour.

  I looked for them in the storage tent.

  Nobody in there. Just what looked to be maybe two-thirds of our stuff. Like she hadn’t even finished unloading.

  I looked into the trailer. It was empty.

  She hadn’t been kidding when she said all our stuff wasn’t much.

  I looked again at the stacks of boxes, trying to adjust to the idea that this really was everything we owned. It seemed impossible. Pathetic.

  I sighed a couple of times and then grabbed the plastic bin of towels. I saw a tied-up garbage bag that looked like blankets. I took it sight unseen.

  I ran back to the sleeping tent, forgetting about dry clothes. When I got zipped back in and remembered, it was more than I could take on. It was too much trouble.

  Everything was just too much.

  I opened the lid on the bin of towels and took out the rattiest one. I used it to soak up most of the water on the tent floor. But it soaked through immediately, and the floor was still plenty wet. I pulled out another towel.

  Underneath it, I saw my mom’s old jewelry box. Which seemed weird, because she’d sold all her jewelry a long time ago—the few things from Grandma worth selling. I wondered why she even kept it. Then I wondered what she kept in it if she had no more jewelry.

  I opened the lid.

  Inside was a wallet, a Timex watch, and a plain silver ring.

  I opened the wallet. My dad’s face smiled back at me from the driver’s license. Which was a shock I can’t quite describe. I quick shut the wallet, threw it back in the box, and shut the box. I covered it up with a clean towel and put the lid back on the bin.

  First I thought, I know what this means. It means the police returned that stuff to her.

  Except, she never told me they returned it. Why would she not tell me that? Besides, they could only get it back to us if they caught the guy. Which they never did.

  Then I thought, It means they caught the guy. Whether I know it or not.

  Except then there would have been a trial. And besides, how could I not know? It would have been on the news, and in the paper. The other kids at school would have seen it. The neighbors would have seen it.

  I tore open the plastic blanket bag, even though I knew I should have carefully untied the knot. I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat there wondering where Sophie and my mom had gone, without the car, in the pouring rain.

  But I couldn’t keep my mind off the watch and the wallet and the ring.

  I thought, I have no idea what it means.

  Except… I knew it meant that everything I’d always believed was not necessarily true.

  It was probably another hour before my mom stuck her head into the tent. Rain water poured from her long hair, pooling on the floor I’d worked so hard to get dry.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

  I thought, Are you a liar? Do you lie to me? Because that would be a problem.

  I said, “Where’s Sophie?”

  “That’s the problem. I have no idea. I let her out to move around, and she ran. I tried to catch her, but I slipped in the mud. By the time I got back up, I couldn’t see where she’d gone. I’ve been looking for her for hours. She must be hiding. I have no idea what to do.”

  Which was my mom’s way of saying, “Now you do something.” When my mom said she was out of ideas, it meant I had to step up.

  I just sat a minute, not sure what to say. It seemed to make her nervous.

  “You think I should ask the campground host for help?” she asked. “He seemed nice.”

  “No,” I said. I thought he’d just use it as proof that we couldn’t handle her. That he and his wife were right, and my mom and I were wrong. But I kept that part to myself. “What’s he supposed to do, anyway? If you can’t find her, how’s he supposed to find her?”

  More silence. I was feeling frozen, like in that dream. No part of me wanted to move. Or even felt like it could.

  “Kiddo,” she said, “we have to do something.”

  I opened my mouth to say, “I can’t do this. You can’t keep asking me to take care of things.” I was overwhelmed, out of ideas, almost at the edge of tears. I was cold, I was wet, I was homeless. I was fourteen. I wasn’t anybody’s mother. I hadn’t lost Sophie. It wasn’t fair that I had to be the one to find her.

  I closed my mouth on all of those things.

  When I opened it again, I heard myself say, “Do you have Paul’s phone number?”

  “No, but I have his address.”

  “I’d want to call first. It’s going to really freak him out if I just show up at the door.”

  “Okay. I’ll go to the pay phone and see if I can get a listing.”

  I sat awhile longer, wondering why I hadn’t heard her calling for Sophie. I could only guess that she hadn’t called. Maybe she’d thought it went without saying that Sophie wouldn’t come.

  But I wondered if it was more my mom Sophie was hiding from. Less me.

  I stuck my head out through the tent flap and yelled her name. I didn’t mean to scream it. But it came out as a scream. It came out with all the panic, all the confusion… everything I’d been holding in.

  A tent flap opened next door, and someone peeked out. I saw the curtain shift aside in the window of a motorhome. Then nothing moved. Wherever Sophie was, she couldn’t hear me. Either that or she heard me fine and just decided to stay put.

  I looked up to see my mom standing over me. “No listing,” she said.

  “All right. Take me there.”

  “Take you there?”

  “Did you really not hear me?”

  “What if she comes back while we’re gone?”

  “I don’t know. I just kno
w I have to try this. We have to do something that might work. She’s soaking wet. If it gets down below freezing tonight… which it might… she’ll freeze. She won’t survive a night out.”

  A long pause, during which my mom stood in the pouring rain. Not trying to stay dry in any way.

  “I think we need to call the police,” she said.

  “Let me try this first.”

  “We’re burning daylight, kiddo.”

  “It might work, though. And then we wouldn’t have to tell anybody. What if the police find her and don’t give her back?”

  “Why wouldn’t they give her back?”

  I didn’t answer.

  After a while, I guess she got tired of standing in the rain, because she came inside the tent and sat close to me. I could feel a whole new lake pouring off her wet clothes and pooling underneath my butt.

  “Why wouldn’t they give her back?”

  “I don’t know. Because we can’t handle her. How many times are they supposed to come out and find her if we can’t keep her from running off?”

  “Look. Kiddo. They might charge us for her rescue the second or third time. They might even stop responding to our calls. But they can’t just keep her.”

  “They take kids away from parents when the parents can’t keep them safe.”

  “I think the parent has to be unfit for that to happen.”

  “You sure?”

  Long silence.

  Then she said, “What’s Paul supposed to do?”

  “Nothing. I’m not going to ask him to do anything. It’s his dog I think could help. What if I could yell to Sophie that Rigby was here? She’d come running when she heard that.”

  A sigh from her. “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Let me try it. It’s our best bet. She’ll hide from the police or a search-and-rescue team, too. This is the only thing I can think of that might really work.”

  “I’ll have to tell the campground host to watch for her while we’re gone.”

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  She ducked out of the tent again, leaving rain blowing into my face. I zipped up the flap.